Your profile contributions graph is a record of contributions you've made to repositories on GitHub. They can reveal a lot of information at a quick glance, and it is understandable you’d want them to be accurate, up to date, and consistent.

This guide will help you diagnose common causes of inconsistencies with contributions and take the steps to fix it.

Quick Fix – Start Here

None of the above work? Use @minhqdao's workaround below: "Renaming the default branch and then renaming it back made the contributor list update for me. I had already tried pretty much everything else."

What’s under the hood

There are different views of profile and repository activity that show different metrics. They can often be conflicting because they are measured differently.

• Profile contribution graph: Personal contributions dependent on eligibility rules, these are measured by authored date
• Pulse: Top 15 committers to the default branch
• Insights → Contributors: Top 100 contributors to the repository who have qualifying commits on the default branch, this excludes merge and empty commits
• Repository Activity View: Pushes, merges, force pushes, and branch changes, associated with authenticated actors
• Commit history: Commits from the selected branch
• Insights → Commits: Non-merge commits from the past year

You will get different results in different views because each view has its own criteria for measurement.

Other scenarios

Here are some other situations you may find yourself in and how to solve them.

• Stale contributor after rewriting history: Refer to @khasky’s Gist on how removing a stale contributor
• AI tool, bot, or GitHub App shown as a contributor: Check out this comment in the community from @jannoguer
• Private contributions not displayed publicly: Make sure the visibility of your private contributions is enabled, refer to the doc to learn how

Wrong Contribution/Contributor Checklist

• Confirm the commit is on the default or eligible branch
• Verify commit author email and account association
• Check repository visibility and contribution settings
• Inspect the commit history rather than relying on the sidebar
• Allow for processing or cache delays ~24
• Confirm history rewrites were pushed successfully

What can you change about contributions and contributors?

What you can change:

• Change author information in existing commits by rewriting history: Changes the Git commit objects and their attribution. Rewriting creates new commit hashes and requires a force-push.
• Add Co-authored-by trailers to new or rewritten commits: Gives multiple people authorship credit when the trailer uses an email connected to each person’s GitHub account. Existing commits must be rewritten to add the trailer retroactively. View our docs to learn how.
• Change private-contribution visibility: Controls whether private activity counts appear publicly on a user’s profile; it does not change the underlying repository history.

What you can’t change ❌

• Adding, removing, renaming, or reordering someone in the calculated contributors graph: It shows up to the top 100 contributors, excludes merge and empty commits, and derives the result from qualifying commits.
• Historical contributions: Removing repository access or blocking someone does not remove historical contribution attribution.

The best place to go for help, by situation

What to include when asking for help

• Repository URL and affected username
• Exact GitHub views that disagree
• Example commit SHAs
• Whether history was rewritten
• When the change occurred
• Screenshots with sensitive information removed

We hope you can navigate your contributions more easily now, make sure to bookmark this so next time there is a confusing contribution you can self-solve :check:.